The need for this invention arises from surgical practice, particularly surgical practice using laparoscopic instruments involving small incisions, using a video camera lens or focusing device inserted in one of the incisions to view the field of the operation inside the patient and surgical instruments inserted in other incisions and manipulated from outside the patient's body using a TV screen or similar type of monitor for visualization, usually enlarged, to guide the work.
Anything that can reduce the number of steps to be performed in such an operation can markedly reduce the stress, both on the patient and on the doctor. Surgeons performing such operations are under considerable stress because remote manipulation using a monitor for visualization, rather than seeing the site of the operation directly requires the learning of a great many techniques that are radically different from those performed when the surgical site is open to view. These include indirect hand-eye coordination, and cooperation between surgeons to place and secure sutures.
The placing of sutures during a laparoscopic procedure typically requires two surgeons to cooperate in a multi-step process performed with multiple surgical instruments to manipulate the needle and suture and pass it back and forth from one to another, cooperation in tying the knot etc. This invention arose from the difficulty of such manipulations and the need to minimize that difficulty.